Corrupt Review: My Favorite Chilean WineAmelia Would Make You Rethink Everything You Know About Chilean Wine if You Knew Anything About Chilean Wine
In the 1970s, my family would occasionally be gifted fruit. Not durians or mangosteens – just Florida oranges or pears from Oregon. They’d come in a box and were individually wrapped in crinkled paper. I’d look at the fruit, and then at my Apple IIe, and then at the fruit again, and then at my Atari 2600, and try to figure out what century we lived in.
So whenever I see a wine bottle that comes wrapped in paper, I think, “I bet this Napa cabernet sauvignon is Harry & David quality.” The wrapping on the pinot noir and chardonnay I was sent from Amelia was affixed with a sticker with a drawing of an airplane. I have struggled to resist writing a paragraph about my childhood sticker album, but know that I liked this touch very much. Amelia wines are made by Concha y Toro, the largest wine producer in Latin America and the eighth-largest in the world. Founded in 1883, their wines range from the ubiquitous $10 Casillero del Diablo, which sponsors Manchester United
to the $150 Don Melchor, which was Wine Spectator’s 2024 Wine of the Year.
These wines are as tough and strong as the Chilean people, whom I am inventing stereotypes about due to ignorance. And also Concha y Toro offers a “Diablo” night tour of vineyards in Chile that comes with a three-course dinner and a guide dressed like this:
The only wines from Chile I know about are Carmenères, a red grape the French mix in teeny amounts into some Bordeaux. But in Chile, it’s a silky, creamy, herbaceous red that feels like Merlot and tastes like Cabernet Franc, a wine so easy to love that it would have driven Paul Giamatti’s character in Sideways even crazier than he already was. Amelia comes from Concha y Toro’s luxury collection, and sells both its Chardonnay and Pinot Noir for $55.
Almost all Chilean wine is grown in the middle of the country, where it rains, which makes sense since water is something plants really like. Amelia, however, grows its grapes in the arid Limari Valley, one of the driest winegrowing areas on Earth, just south of the Atacama Desert, the second driest place on Earth after some part of Antarctica. Normally, farmers brag about the rich soil and hot sun that help them grow their state-fair-winning watermelons. Winemakers, however, are all about suffering. They rhaposidize about grapes grown on the side of an active volcano, in ash, on steep terraces that can only be accessed by Tour de France champions. If a 100-year-old grapevine is only able to produce one misshapen grape, it gets celebrated in whatever the French equivalent of a narcocorrido is. Amelia is named after Amelia Earhart, partly because of the adventure of making wine somewhere difficult. I personally wouldn’t be that excited to work for a startup named after a failed project where everyone died, like an AI company called “Robot Murder.” But I’m not a high-end winemaker. But if you’re the biggest wine producer in Latin America, you can afford to gamble on something that probably won’t work. Maybe after their success with Amelia, they’ll make a wine called Hindenburg from grapes in that desert in Antarctica. I really like these wines. They’re attempting to mimic the clarity and seriousness of Burgundy by using the two great grapes of the region and planting them in cooler climates. But they can’t completely hide their South America. The Chardonnay has a lushness and vibrancy. The Pinot Noir is indeed light, but it’s also got fresh fruit. It did very well in my rating system, which precisely measures how much is left in the bottle after dinner. There was far more leftover salmon than pinot. I can get Burgundy Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs from Burgundy. But I can only get these wines from a place in Chile where they shouldn’t be making them. You're currently a free subscriber to The Corrupt Wine Writer. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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Thursday, January 15, 2026
Corrupt Review: My Favorite Chilean Wine
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